she told me about the death of her father when she was eight, about her mother, brother, live-in grandparents, her German background, bouts of depression, Dr. Beuscher, the rejection of a story, not being admitted to a coveted writers’ workshop, that to her the desire to write was the same as the desire to live, that one didn’t work without the other, that she stopped loving life when her imagination seemed dead, she had been afraid she would never get another sentence down on paper. She admitted she’d secretly hoped that the electroshock therapy would undo that paralysis, resurrect the
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